Where's My Cow?

The most emotionally efficient fictional book in this catalogue, and the strongest argument for the Discworld shelf being worth building out.

The mechanism is simple and completely ruthless. Pratchett establishes early that Vimes reads to his son at six. Then he spends the novel putting obstacles between Vimes and six o’clock — escalating, legitimate, city-threatening obstacles, the kind any other copper would reasonably prioritise. And Vimes goes home. Every time. By the last act the reader has been trained to understand that the reading is not sentiment, it is the load-bearing wall of the man’s character, and when something finally tries to get inside his head the book is what it runs into.

The improvisation detail is the part that earns it. Vimes finds the original book boring and starts substituting: instead of a cow, the sound of Foul Ole Ron, of Coalface, of the city his son is actually going to grow up in. A father quietly deciding what his child needs to be prepared for, disguised as reading a picture book badly.

And then it was published. An actual hardback, in the same year as the novel, containing both versions — so the object Vimes reads from and the object you can read to your own child are the same object. Very few fictional books complete that circuit, and none of the others do it while making you cry.

On the readability rating. Yes. It is a real picture book, in print, and short enough to read at six o’clock.